Is Your Website Even Working? A 5-Minute Check

Before you worry about keywords, rankings, or backlinks, answer a simpler question: does your website actually work? A site that’s slow to load, broken on phones, or missing from Google can’t be helped by SEO. SEO makes a working site easier to find. It can’t fix a site that’s invisible or broken in the first place.

This is step zero. It takes about five minutes, and you don’t need any technical skill to do it. You’re just going to look at your own website the way a stranger would, using your phone, a search engine, and a few clicks.

Grab your phone and a laptop or desktop computer, and work through each check below in order. If everything passes, you’re ready to think about SEO. If something fails, you’ve just found the actual problem worth fixing first.

1. Does it load at all?

Open your website’s homepage in a normal browser window. Not a tab you already have open, not a bookmark you saved months ago, and not a browser where you’re logged into your own site as an admin. Open a fresh window (or a private/incognito window) and type your domain name in yourself.

Do this on both your computer and your phone. Watch what actually loads: does the page appear within a few seconds, does the text and layout look right, and is this the current version of your site, not an old cached one? Read the homepage as if you were a visitor seeing it for the first time.

If nothing loads, or you get a browser error page instead of your site, the problem isn’t SEO. It’s likely something with your domain or hosting. If you’re not sure what the difference is between those two things and why either one could cause this, Website vs. Domain vs. Hosting Explained walks through it.

2. Is it mobile-friendly?

Looking at your site on a phone isn’t the same as using it on a phone. Most of your visitors will be on mobile, so this check matters as much as the first one.

On your phone, tap the menu button and confirm it opens. Try filling in a field on any form, like a name or email box, and see if it’s actually usable or too small to tap accurately. Read a full paragraph of text without pinching to zoom in.

If you have to zoom to read anything, if buttons are too small or too close together to tap, or if the menu doesn’t open, your site has a mobile problem. This alone can chase away most of your potential visitors, regardless of how well the site ranks.

3. Does it have a secure connection (HTTPS)?

Look at your browser’s address bar while your site is open. You should see a small padlock icon next to your domain name.

That padlock means your site uses HTTPS, which encrypts the connection between your visitor’s browser and your server so nobody in between can read or tamper with the data. Without it, browsers like Chrome and Safari show visitors a “Not Secure” warning right in the address bar, and some will show a full-page warning before letting them in at all. Either way, it scares people off before they’ve read a word of your content.

If you don’t see the padlock, contact your hosting provider about installing an SSL certificate. This is usually a quick fix and often free.

4. Can a stranger actually find it on Google?

Open Google and search for your business name plus your city, for example “Riverside Plumbing Austin” instead of just “Riverside Plumbing.” Searching your brand name alone isn’t a fair test, because Google (and your own browser history) already knows you visit that site constantly, which can nudge it to show up for you even if a stranger would never see it.

Adding your city or a service term mimics how an actual potential customer searches. Look at the first page of results and see whether your site appears at all, and if so, roughly where.

If you don’t see your site anywhere, don’t panic yet. This is common and fixable, but it deserves its own deeper look. Read Why Can’t People Find My Website on Google? for the full breakdown of what might be going on.

5. Is it indexed at all?

There’s a faster, more direct way to check whether Google has your site stored in its index (the massive database of pages it draws search results from). In the Google search box, type site:yourdomain.com, replacing “yourdomain.com” with your actual domain, and press enter.

This shows you roughly how many of your pages Google has indexed, and which ones. If you see a handful of results with your pages listed, Google knows your site exists. If you see a message saying no results match, or you only see pages you didn’t expect (like an old placeholder page from your hosting provider), that’s a real red flag worth investigating further.

6. Do the important things actually work?

A homepage that loads doesn’t guarantee the rest of the site works. Click through your main navigation menu, one link at a time, and confirm each page actually loads instead of erroring out or landing you somewhere unexpected.

If you have a contact form, fill it out with test information and submit it. Confirm you receive the message, whether that’s an email notification or an entry in a dashboard. If you have a phone number or email address listed as a clickable link, tap it on your phone and make sure it opens your phone app or email app with the right number or address already filled in.

These are the moments where visitors turn into actual customers. A broken contact form or a phone link that opens the wrong app quietly costs you business every day it goes unnoticed.

7. Check for a 404 error

A 404 error means “page not found.” It’s what shows up when you click a link to a page that doesn’t exist, whether because it was deleted, moved, or the link was typed wrong in the first place.

Try clicking a few links across your site, including ones in your footer, blog posts, or older pages you haven’t looked at in a while. If any of them land you on a page saying something like “404” or “Page Not Found,” that link is broken and needs to be fixed or removed. A single stray 404 isn’t a crisis, but finding several is a sign your site has drifted out of good repair.

Common mistakes or misconceptions

A few habits quietly undermine this whole check, so watch out for them:

• Testing only on your own computer. Your browser remembers your login, your cached files, and your search history. What you see isn’t what a new visitor sees.
• Assuming a working homepage means the whole site works. Individual pages can break, get deleted, or lose their forms without touching the homepage at all.
• Searching only your own brand name. This proves people who already know you can find you. It says nothing about whether strangers searching for what you offer will ever see you.
• Ignoring mobile because “I always check on desktop.” Most visitors today are on a phone. A site that looks fine on a laptop can be nearly unusable on a small screen.
• Confusing “the site loads for me” with “the site loads.” A slow connection, an old device, or a different browser can surface problems you’d never see on your own setup.

Practical next step: run the full checklist right now

Work through this list in order. It takes about five minutes:

1. Open your homepage in a fresh, private browser window, on both desktop and phone.
2. On your phone, tap the menu, fill in a form field, and read a paragraph without zooming.
3. Look for the padlock icon in the address bar to confirm HTTPS.
4. Google your business name plus your city and see if your site appears.
5. Search site:yourdomain.com to see how many pages are indexed.
6. Click every main navigation link, submit a test form, and tap any phone or email links.
7. Click around for any 404 “page not found” errors, especially in older pages and the footer.

If everything passes, your site is live, visible, and functional, and it’s genuinely ready for SEO work. If something failed, fix that first. It’ll matter more than any keyword change you could make.

FAQ

What if my site isn’t in Google’s index at all?

This is more common than you’d think, especially for new or recently redesigned sites. Start with Why Can’t People Find My Website on Google? to work through the likely causes step by step.

How often should I run this health check?

Once a month is a reasonable habit, and definitely after any redesign, hosting change, or plugin update. It only takes five minutes and catches problems before they cost you visitors.

My site passed every check. What should I do next?

You’re ready to start thinking about SEO. What Is Search Engine Optimization? is a good next read to understand what it actually involves and where to focus first.

Can a slow site still “pass” this checklist?

Technically yes, if it eventually loads and everything works, but slow load times frustrate visitors and can hurt how Google treats your site. If pages take more than a few seconds to appear, run your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights for a free, specific breakdown of what’s slowing it down.